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Two Times EPA Chief, William Ruckelshaus, Says The GOP’s Purposeful Climate Change Denial Is ‘Killing Everything’

William Ruckelshaus, United States’ first Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief in former President Richard Nixon’s administration, ripped the environmental policies of President Donald Trump and Republicans on Friday by warning that their denial of the dangers of climate change, risks the lives of American people.

“It’s a threat to the country,” Ruckelshaus told Huffington Post in an interview over the phone. “If you don’t step up and take care of real problems, and don’t do anything about it, lives will be sacrificed.”

He claimed that Trump’s environmental policies, which are further harming the country and the planet altogether, would be a key legacy of his administration.

“They certainly are killing everything,” he said.

85-year-old Ruckelshaus, who was appointed as the first head of the newly-established EPA in 1970 by Nixon, has been an active and harsh critic of Scott Pruitt, current EPA Administrator.

He had compared Pruitt’s inclination for deregulation to Anne Gorsuch, former President Ronald Reagan’s first EPA administrator. After Gorsuch was held in contempt of Congress and resigned from office, Ruckelshaus replaced her. Ruckelshaus had also cautioned Pruitt, former Oklahoma attorney general, against overlooking regulations and getting in bed with large polluting industries.

“They don’t believe in the mission of the agency,” he said. “Neither one of them did. Anne Gorsuch did not, and I don’t think Pruitt does either. They think we’re over-regulating.”

In the mid-2000s, The Republican Party – at a time when they could be considered real Republicans – was considering and calling for serious action toward reducing and controlling the effects of climate change. John McCain called for renewable energy investments, caps on greenhouse gas emissions and subsidies for electric cars, however, he also backed aggressive oil drillings and was skeptical about the whole thing, so much so that he was not sure about the U.S. joining international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol. Koch Industries’ kings, the billionaire Koch brothers, became extensively active in the environmental policies of the Republican Party and a megadonor for the party to see their biddings through. Having felt the dangers of former President Barack Obama’s environmental policies on their industries, which would harm them quite considerably, Koch brothers reformed the GOP’s overall view on the climate change and turned it to a complete climate denial; a sham so well engineered that after only a few years they have a goon doing their work for them in the Oval Office.

“To a certain extent, the Republican position for years now, really starting with Gorsuch, has been ideologically antagonistic to these kinds of controls over industry,” Ruckelshaus said. “Republicans tend to spend more time on economic impacts of what they’re doing than Democrats, but they were all serious about it, and they didn’t think it was nonsense.”

“Pruitt has already had success ― ideological success ― because he seems to be complying with the wishes of the Republican Party,” he added.

Three former EPA administrators told Huffington Post last week that the next agency chief, considering that he or she is not a climate-denier and a Republican, would have to work for decades to restore the EPA which is being completely ruined under Pruitt. Carol Browner, former President Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator, said it could take up to 20 or 30 years.

“The agency would have to open up completely,” Ruckelshaus said. “Not just surreptitiously reinstating what the Trump administration took away.”

Ruckelshaus warned that the dangers posed by climate change were real and that challenging them would prove a complicated and difficult task. He noted that key agencies like the EPA that need to put more scientists researching the problem have become a tool for the capitalists in the country to have their way.

“If your position is, ‘I don’t believe the science, therefore I’m going to get rid of all the scientists studying this, and let’s not mention it in any public announcement,’ that’s just crazy,” Ruckelshaus said. “What you want to do is more science.”

“I don’t think Pruitt cares about this stuff at all,” Ruckelshaus concluded. “He’s just like Trump, he’s got an ideological approach to it, an approach that affects the large contributors in his party in Oklahoma.”